Of the Australian sports feature documentaries released over the past decade, it’s no surprise that such a large number of them have focused on AFL, the biggest sport in the land. 

At least nine have centred on the sport, including two documentaries released in the same year about the same person: Adam Goodes (The Australian Dream and The Final Quarter, 2019). 

Cricket has also scored a six with Australian doco filmmakers, with around five feature documentaries and TV series exploring the sport and its players.

Para-sport, however, has been largely overlooked. And as far as Cinema Australia can tell, only one Australian feature documentary in this period, 2024’s Beyond the Dream: Forged in Steel, has focused specifically on para-sport.

That makes Hard as Puck an exciting and important addition to the Australian sports documentary landscape. Here’s hoping Hard as Puck inspires other filmmakers to explore the subject and helps balance the constant flow of AFL and cricket docos being produced here.  

The new feature documentary marks the directorial debut of filmmaker Isaac Elliott and producing debut of Western Australian producer Chanel Bowen who co-produced Hard as Puck alongside Noel Smyth who also served as cinematographer. 

Set in Perth, Hard as Puck follows a struggling para ice hockey club with few players, little money and no major sponsors. Relying heavily on grants to survive, the club faces an uncertain future when its enigmatic founder, and chief grant procurer, prepares to step away.

Through setbacks and personal clashes, bitter losses and hard-fought victories, Hard as Puck explores what it takes to run a local sporting club, and what happens when a small community team begins to develop unexpected international ambitions.

Originally from Alice Springs, Isaac Elliott is a creator, director and writer who has worked across television and documentary. He co-created and directed episodes of the ABC/Netflix series MaveriX, earning ADG and AACTA nominations, and was named an Inside Film Rising Star director in 2022. His previous work includes The Legend of Burnout Barry, documentaries for VICE, SBS and ABC, and featured in documentary FINKE: There and Back, narrated by Eric Bana.

Ahead of the film’s world premiere at the Melbourne International Film Festival and homecoming screening at CinefestOZ, Cinema Australia spoke with Isaac Elliott about making his feature documentary debut, the realities of para ice hockey, and why this unlikely group of players deserves to have their story told.

“I’ve watched a bunch of videos about how Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and others regularly outperform even America at the Winter Olympics. It’s not because their Olympic funding is much higher; it’s because their local-level sports funding is higher.“

Interview by Matthew Eeles

It’s a real thrill for me to be interviewing you right now, because I was really moved by your story as told in Dylan River’s Finke: There and Back and I still think about it often. Are you still involved in racing in any capacity?

Well, the fun thing about Finke is that I broke my back in 2007, and that’s not told in the Finke movie. I’m revealing trade secrets here. [Laughs]. I raced in 2008 and finished, and then in 2009 and finished on a modified bike. In 2010, I broke down. I didn’t ride again until 2017, when I got a bike six weeks before the race and just rushed in and started the race with a bike that had, I think, an hour and a half of ride time on it. And then I did the race.

Another fun fact is that Dylan didn’t have a bike at that time, so he pulled the bars and my seat off, put a standard seat and foot pegs on it, and the very last shot of the film is Dylan on my bike riding past the camera. So he started preparing to race on my bike afterwards. He did more hours on my bike than I did.

I didn’t ride again until 2022 or 2023. Christina Vithoulkis, who’s a friend from South Australia, is a paralysed drift car driver. She went up to Finke and I got her to bring my bike back to Melbourne for me. She took it to her dad’s farm in the Riverland and, a few months later, brought it down to Melbourne. On my birthday in September, she dropped my motorbike off, which was very exciting. It then took about another year to get it modified. The last two years I’ve been riding again a lot around Melbourne at tracks. I really love motocross, so lots of jumps and tight corners and things like that. I’ve really got back into it over the last few years and I just got a new bike. It’s actually in the middle of being modified. I’ve got to go and look at the first stage of modifications tonight.

You’re obviously keen to keep riding, but is racing something that you’re still passionate about and enjoy today?

I keep trying because I think a lot of things take a lot of help to do. It takes a village or whatever. I’ve tried lots of solo activities. I got really into video games for a while, but they were really not my thing. I have two remote-control cars because I thought, “Maybe that’ll be it.” Then I got a remote-control motorbike and thought, “This will be my thing. I’ll use that. That’ll be my adrenaline outlet.” But nothing is quite the same.

In a strange way, the NDIS has allowed me to hire support workers and friends to help me ride, which has basically unlocked riding for me in Melbourne. I don’t have motorbike friends down here, so the film community and the motorbike community don’t overlap at all. It’s really allowed me to not feel guilty asking for help because I can employ people as support workers and they can help me do something that’s just for me. So it has become a bit of a lifesaver and created this independence in my ability to do a sport.

I’ve tried para ice hockey as well, and it’s very difficult. Nothing gives me the adrenaline rush that motorbikes give me. The interesting thing with para ice hockey is that I’m really conscious of being hurt. Although you can obviously get hurt riding a motorbike, it only happens when you make a mistake. In para ice hockey, getting hit and slammed into the wall is just part of the game. It isn’t a mistake. And I find that more terrifying than motorbike riding because you can control the danger.

Hard as Puck is your debut feature documentary as director. I’m wondering if you were inspired in any way by Dylan’s work on Finke, and if you took anything away from your time working with him for this film?

Dylan’s a good friend. I think he can really solo shoot. Sometimes I feel like I have the soul of a solo shooter, but I need someone else to hold the camera, which can get a little challenging. I think what I really took from Dylan is that I’m not really big on shot lists and things like that. For documentary, I really want to learn something in a space and respond to the space. I think that’s what I learned from Dylan. You go, “That person’s going to be with their motorbike in a shed or something like that.” Just go there and see what comes to you. I’ve started doing improv, and I think that’s really helped me feel confident that something will happen in a space.

Wait, you’ve started doing improv?

Well, basically, I got asked to audition for Safe Home, I think it’s called, an ABC TV series. I didn’t know how to do a self-tape, so I didn’t submit one. I contacted a bunch of drama schools and none of them were accessible, so I thought, “Well, improv is the next closest thing.” I found an accessible improv school in Melbourne and have been doing it ever since. I love that there’s no homework. I love that you go into a place and they call it play: “Let’s play together.” There’s a childish joy to it, but there’s also a really beautiful structure to it. It’s a structure that you have to find in the moment.

The number one thing in improv is listening. People get scared of improv because they think, “I’m never going to be able to come up with something.” If you keep trying to come up with something, you don’t have a scene, you just have a bunch of bits. Bits are funny. I love a bit. I love a good bit. But you’re never going to have anything if you’re just doing bits. The big laugh comes from a true human reaction, emotion, a slip-up, or a slightly absurd take on something that comes from a true place. Those are all things that happen in the moment in improv that you obviously can’t plan.

I’ve just started a class called Sofa Sessions, where it’s just scenes that happen on a sofa. And the sofa could be a park bench or any kind of bench where you sit next to each other. They just say, “Go.” And whatever happens, happens. I really enjoy the connection you have to have in that moment. You can’t be thinking about anything else. For two or two and a half hours a week, you just have to be out of everyday life and in this world of playing. It’s quite joyous.

The more that I’m speaking to you here, the more that I’m learning that you are up for any challenge. Is this a correct assumption? Is there anything that you wouldn’t do?

I think having a deep and meaningful conversation in real life is a challenge. There’s something I struggle with there, and creating an artifice can help to break down those kinds of barriers. The artifice can be film and the artifice can be improv.

For a while there, I only wanted to do interviews in films down the barrel of the camera because then you have to have a complicated technical setup where I’m also looking down the barrel of a different camera and there’s a slight remove. I made a doco for SBS called We Are Sexual Beings, and because I knew we were talking about quite sensitive topics, I didn’t feel comfortable looking directly at people. I wanted an artifice of kind of remove.

I think I’m up for lots of things, but I would say that I have a philosophy of being risk-aware, not risk-averse. I’m very safety-conscious. On my motorbike, I’ve just got a new helmet, not because my old one was broken, but because the new one has better technology and therefore better safety. I’ve got a new body armour system as well. I’m really aware of the risks and take precautions to be as safe as possible, but not to not do the thing. It feels silly. I’m more afraid of horses than I am of motorbikes because there’s less control over how safe or unsafe you are.

You were approached by producer Chanel Bowen to direct Hard as Puck. What was your first reaction to Chanel’s proposal?

Chanel emailed me and I was on the cusp of directing an episode of Neighbours before it closed down. I was like, “No, no, Chanel. I’m in the drama world now. I’ve graduated.” [Laughs]. And so I didn’t reply.

But I then got asked by Media Mentors to direct some interviews because they knew that I could elicit an interesting response or have a lot of rapport with someone I was interviewing. Chanel was one of the people I was interviewing, so I couldn’t ignore her after that. She showed me the pitch. She originally called it Mighty Pucks, which I was like, “First thing, that name’s got to change.”

Why? Mighty Pucks is a great name!

Because Mighty Ducks is already about ice hockey. Having the pun on ice hockey be “pucks” when it’s already about ice hockey doesn’t make any sense. Someone in the ice hockey world said, “Number one thing, you’ve got to change that because every single ice hockey-related anything starts with Mighty Ducks and tries to create some kind of fun on Mighty Ducks.” So we ended up with Hard As Puck, which I found funnier.

Chanel showed me the documents and we had a conversation. I said, “I don’t know anything about the sport. I don’t know the people. I don’t know the world or the location.” So the first thing we did was fly me over to Perth. We did a version of a writers’ room where we sat for a few days with the team and talked about all of the individual stories to get a sense of who they were. They had a game on the weekend I was over there and I watched them play, so I got a sense of the sport. Then we came back and considered what the story could be and shot a development reel that was really focused on the characters and their stories.

In retrospect, that was very good for knowing the characters and building rapport, but it didn’t necessarily help us shoot para ice hockey in a cinematic way, which is really difficult because they’re so low to the ice. The ice has boards around the outside that are basically above their head height, so you’re always shooting down on long lenses. We knew we had to devise a way to shoot them in a really cinematic way. In our development, we just made that clear in our documents: we’re going to figure something out. We don’t know what it is yet, but we’ll figure it out. We’ll improvise. We’ll get there.

Have you had any involvement with struggling sports clubs before?

I grew up in Alice Springs and my parents were the caretakers for the motorcycle club. We were basically involved in that club from when I got my first bike, when I was eight. We were involved in the club in various states, with my parents being on the committee, me being on the committee, and I was a coach for a very short while. It wasn’t until we got involved with this club that we realised this is a film about a group of people who are kind of disparate. Some are close, some are not so close, but they’re all drawn together around this sport. That paralleled growing up around this club, where people’s only real connection to each other was the club and the sport. Outside of that, nobody hung out for any other reason.

And this is what we found in this club. They’re such disparate people, but they’re connecting around the sport. At times you’re like, “How is anything going to happen?” There’s infighting and bickering, people not pulling their weight, people doing too much, people booking things and not booking things, booking things too late and forgetting things.

Then you get to the events and they happen. And they happen because there are just a few people who do everything. It seems the same in every club. It just becomes a few people. And one of the people in our film, the founder, wants to get out, but he can’t leave until there’s a functioning club without him. And it takes a lot to get there.

You mentioned writers’ room-style meetings at the beginning. How much of this documentary’s narrative was planned prior to shooting compared to how much unfolded organically?

None. None at all. None of it was planned. We initially planned to shoot the men’s team the year before they went to the World Championships, but we ran too long getting funding and didn’t get there. We were going to do a really fast, high-intensity shoot in the lead-up to the World Championships in 2024, but it didn’t happen. So we came into the shoot thinking, “We don’t know what’s going to happen.” Maybe they’d go back to the World Championships, but we knew we just had to start shooting. The first thing we shot was the Bunnings sausage sizzle. They were having a sausage sizzle to raise money and an open day, so we thought, “All right, we’re going to come over for two days and shoot that and see what happens.”

On the drive to the Sunday open day, the president said, “I’m looking at resigning.” We were like, “Okay, maybe that’s our story. But we don’t know.” Then they had another fundraising event, a quiz night where everyone dressed up. We went back and thought, “Okay, how has this resignation story progressed?” That started the ball rolling because we knew what to ask and what to get to the bottom of. We wanted to get a sense of what people were feeling going into the season because they still hadn’t played a game, we hadn’t filmed a game, and we didn’t know where it was going.

We went back six or seven times over the course of the year because Noel, the cinematographer, and I are based in Melbourne. We’d fly over and then come back. We were really not sure where it was going and were contemplating doing lots of different things. We spent three days shooting with a character in Collie who, unfortunately, didn’t factor into the final story and was cut, which was very sad. It was incredibly beautiful footage.

But when we came down to the edit, it was like, “What’s our story?” It really wasn’t until we were given this gift. The documentary gods give you gifts at times, and the gift of Dawn and the Women’s World Championships gave us scale. By the end of our second shoot, we knew we had a small, quirky documentary about a quirky club in a quirky sport, but we didn’t know if we had scale or a big finale. Then we caught wind of the Women’s World Championships. That was the gift that the documentary gods gave us.

How keen were the World Ice Hockey Championships to get involved?

World Ice Hockey were very keen. Australian Ice Hockey was just a bit nervous because they knew the level they were at. Everybody was learning, not just the players, but the coaches as well. They were very experienced in stand-up hockey, but it was a whole new thing and everybody was very nervous about having a camera around. It took a bit of us saying, “You are never going to have a team with this kind of passion, budget and capacity ever again, and we are going to be there.”

I wasn’t in Slovakia, so we sent over two cinematographers and hired a local sound recordist. We had daily conversations and saw images from the shoot. We just had to say, “We are going to be there. We are going to be filming it. You’re either on for the ride and you get a chance to platform this sport and platform para ice hockey in Australia, or you’re not.” Once that was really clear, we got a lot of support.

Dawn was so great at giving us an insight into what it takes. In some ways, it’s serious, but there’s also a sort of self-awareness that this is Cool Runnings as well. I think we possibly hear in the back of one shot, although it may have gone in the sound design, but the team was singing the theme song from Cool Runnings before their games. They were all very aware of it. But there’s a real balance of going, “Hey, we know we are Australia and we don’t have a record to sit back on. We’re the upstarts and we’re going to have a go, and we’re going to really have a go.” At the same time, they were representing Australia. They put the green and gold on in the same way that Ian Thorpe put the green and gold on.

I’m curious to know about the commentary used for these games in the film. Was that the actual commentary, or was it recorded in post?

We were given a lot of the broadcast footage and were able to take the commentary from there, but there was so much background noise that it was difficult to hear. There were also two commentators, so it was difficult to make out who was talking. We got the main commentator, Freya, and booked a recording studio in London. I Zoomed over to her at midnight and we rerecorded all of it, mostly based on the script and what she’d originally said, with some small tweaks and clarifications for consistency. She was amazing. She’s a professional broadcaster, but she also used to play the sport.

There’s a really big hit that actually injures one of the Australian players. She wouldn’t say it in the commentary, but she was so angry that there wasn’t a penalty. She was like, “That woman has hit me so many times and she never gets a penalty.” She wouldn’t bring it into the commentary because she was like, “No, I’ve got to stay professional.” But off the recording, she was very angry. There was no penalty served.

So, going back to the team itself, how was it personally for you to experience the fractured dynamics of this club, because there is some infighting? Were you anticipating so much tension?

After the first shoot in January, yes. Documentary is a really funny thing because my job is to make sure everyone is as comfortable as they feel comfortable being honest. I’ve got to really protect the environment to allow them to always feel comfortable. For me, that means that, besides one character, we don’t do sit-down interviews. We try to have conversations because I need to give them as much of myself as they’re going to give of themselves, knowing that there’s still a dynamic where I will cut myself out, obviously, and edit myself out.

I think for me, it was about being honest with everyone so they were comfortable being honest with me. Knowing there was tension there, my job was to get each person’s independent perspective and not colour it with other people’s perspectives that I may or may not have already heard. That was really my job: to make sure I stayed in that lane of going, “I want your perspective.” I might know someone else’s perspective or someone else’s thoughts, but it’s my place to just find out what you think.

Did you sympathise with any individual’s story the most?

I work in drama as well, and I think the one thing I learn in drama is that you have to find empathy for every one of your characters, otherwise you just paint people as villains. Belinda is such a heart and soul of the documentary, mostly because she and Cliff gave us the most time. I really felt for her passion and the challenge of keeping the club alive.

I sympathised with Mike, who was going through a lot of personal drama while also trying to navigate being a professional, being really athletic and being really sports-focused. I empathise with the challenge of maintaining personal relationships while also focusing on your passion.

Rosalie and Mark are, in some ways, the perfect example of passion and sport bringing a couple together rather than breaking a couple apart. But that kind of hyper-fixation can create dramas in other aspects of your life. Dan is very interesting because he doesn’t really have any interest in doing the sport, but he loves to organise things. You can’t help but love someone with such gumption to start it all. Every one of them had this beautiful story or beautiful reason for being there. I think I had to come at it, in the production and in the edit, from the perspective that everyone is coming from their right place and not a wrong place. Friction can come from two people both coming from their right places. In some ways, that’s the funniest, most complex drama: when they’re both right from their own perspective, but they’re both wrong from each other’s perspective.

I’m not asking this question from the perspective of you being a wheelchair user because I know that isn’t a roadblock when it comes to filmmaking, but what was the biggest challenge for you making this documentary as a general filmmaker? There is a lot of travelling, there are a lot of locations, and you’re dealing with so many personalities.

Flat tyres. [Laughs]. No. Our biggest challenge was that every time we shot on the ice, we tried to one-up ourselves. We managed to get a really great ex-figure skater who was sort of a junior in film to initially operate all of our on-camera ice stuff. On our first shoot, she’s just flying around with a Sony A7S filming the open day. Then we got back and I thought, “How can I make something smoother?”

I went to Bunnings, bought a furniture removal trolley, a garden rake handle, some hinges and pivots, and figured out how to make essentially a trolley that you could push with a rake handle. As you turned the handle, it would turn the trolley. We pulled the wheels off, put pucks where the wheels were, and that became our camera sled. Because it was made of hinges and stuff from Bunnings, it had a bit of a wobble to it. Then I looked at a monopod and thought, “If we turn the monopod upside down, flip the head, do this…” I was at Cinemachine in Perth and saw a piece of wood and a drill press. I asked, “Can I use the drill press? Because I think I can make this monopod our handle for this camera sled.” I did, flipped it around and made it all work. We then had a fluid-dampened camera sled that we were able to use for everything after that.

Have you patented this?

No, but I should. [Laughs]. For our pickup shoot, we then mounted a one-by-one LED panel on it to push a bit of extra light, so there are shots of them pushing it with this big light on it as well. My thought was, I remember growing up, we’d go to the go-karts, and go-karts feel so fast when you’re riding them, but they look so slow when you’re watching them from the outside. So we thought, “We need to get low with them. It’s the height that’s going to give them the speed.”

We needed to get the camera down as low as possible. That was our way of getting the lens about four inches off the ground, maybe five at most, with quite a wide-angle lens to really make them feel slightly larger than life.

What we then ran into was monitoring and communication. With a helmet on the ice, when it’s already very, very loud, normal CB radios are just too unclear and you get all the feedback. We needed a headset system, but you can’t wear a headset system with a helmet, and they needed to wear helmets because there are pucks flying around everywhere. We found, very late on, a particular model of headset helmet that allowed headphones out from USB-C and quickly bought them. That became our ability to communicate on and off the ice.

There were a number of shoots where Noel and Akira were on the ice and I could see the image and what I wanted them to shoot, but because they were wearing helmets, I couldn’t communicate with them. We tried phone calls, but there was too much echo and noise. We tried CB radios, and it took us until the last two shoots to figure out a way to communicate while they were on the ice wearing helmets.

That was a real challenge, partly because I couldn’t be on the ice with them. Having that separation was quite difficult. I want to be with the camera. I think I’m kind of a one-man band at heart, or an operator at heart, where I want to feel my way through it. Whenever we really tried to plan some shots that had planned action, the action wouldn’t play out as we wanted it to. So we had to be instinctive and just roll with it.

I found it absolutely staggering that just 5.3% of Australian sports funding goes to para-sports. How does that figure sit with you, and in your opinion, what needs to be done on a government level to increase this number?

I think increasing all sports is important. There’s too much fetishism of austerity that really doesn’t help anyone. It doesn’t help culture, health, society, mental health, everything. I think everything is linked to everything else. That number needs to increase, but it doesn’t have to be as direct as simply building more ice rinks. You build more spaces that are accessible, creating more opportunities for people to do accessible sport. There’s some great stuff being done. I know the AFL are starting to have wheelchair AFL teams attached to their main teams. They have wheelchair AFL, AFLW, junior leagues and all of this. The more we can roll disabled sports into being part of the function of sport, I think the better.

Most basketball teams should try to have a disabled basketball team, or ice hockey teams should try to have a disabled ice hockey team as part of growing the sport. And I think the number is pretty horrid. 5.3% is not great at all. But even in regular sports, I think it’s really underfunded. Government funding should be coming from taxing people properly, not letting them decide which sports will represent them correctly. They’re picking and choosing based on what will give them the biggest uptick in social capital. I think that’s kind of absurd. It also means the support goes to the professionals. It’s not growing sport at a grassroots level or growing the pool of people who can play the sport.

I’ve watched a bunch of videos about how Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and others regularly outperform even America at the Winter Olympics. It’s not because their Olympic funding is much higher; it’s because their local-level sports funding is higher. You don’t have to be rich to play ice hockey or do figure skating. You can do it because it’s community sport. So you have a much bigger pool of potential people to be great at it. I think we need to think of it as growing the pool of people who are going to be great, but also just improving the lives of everyone.

Sport is as much about winning and losing, but really it’s more about community and finding community. 

It’s about giving people who might have one community another community and growing people’s communities. It’s about creating third spaces that have a much bigger, but immeasurable, positive flow-on effect. The challenge is that it’s not direct and directly measurable. It’s not like a toll road where this road made this much money. It’s like a regular road where people were able to do stuff because it was there.

How are you feeling personally about the premiere? Are you ready to present it to a packed house?

I’m very excited to see it with an audience. The challenge when you’re making something is that you start from a point and your job at every stage is to make it better. But at no point do you know if it’s good until it goes in front of an audience. Everyone who’s seen it so far has said it’s really great. I can tell you that it looks great, the characters are amazing and it sounds spectacular. But I can’t tell you if it’s good because everyone has told me it’s good and I think it’s pretty great. Until an audience tells me it’s great, I don’t really know.

I hope people laugh because I really think that if I can make people laugh, and if these characters can make people laugh, you’ll have an amazingly joyful time. They’re pretty dry and they’re pretty funny.

I hope people enjoy it and I hope I enjoy it. Having not seen it for probably a month, I’ll be sitting there at the premiere screening making a bunch of notes that I can’t fix this time and eventually accepting them as just character. Those mistakes are just character. Sometimes that’s what character is. It’s just a mistake.

Hard as Puck will screen at the Melbourne International Film Festival from Saturday, 15 August 2026, and CinefestOZ from Friday, 4 September 2026.

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